Highly Confused by Highlighted Content

Iron Contributor

I'm trying to set up a highlighted webpart (HCWP) to pull content from acrsoss all our sites filtered by value of a specific managed metadata termset.

 

However, when applying the managed property filter in HCWP I cannot find that specific termset (I called it SAMKnowledgeBase) but instead a weirdly named owstaxldSAMKnowledgeBase - what's that all about?

 

Secondly, if I set the value of this property to "Equals" I get zero results even though several documents have exactly this term assigned. If instead, I set it to "Contains" it will pull the correct docs - but this certainly limits the usage of the filter a lot.

 

Thirdly, the display name of each document seem rather random, sometimes it uses the name, sometimes the title and sometimes something else. I read this blog post which clarified some https://joannecklein.com/2017/02/12/demystifying-titles-in-sharepoint-search-delve/

but I still am confused because when trying to edit the "title managed property" as suggested I cannot seem to find filename as a property to include and the default order in this list doesn't seem to reflect in what is actually dispalyed in the webpart.

 

lastly, the image displayed for some of the documents are a complete mystery. In some cases the image does not even exist in the document itself! How can you control what image to display for each document in the HCWP?

16 Replies

To answer a few of your questions: the reason you see owstaxid is that behind the scenes, your metadata is coming from the managed metadata (taxonomy) service. All managed metadata attributes are preceded by owstaxid. As I understand it, the value of your attribute also has some hidden characters as well, which is why Equals will never work unless you know exactly what they are. Therefore, you are correct that in your filter, you need to use Contains. I'm not quite sure I understand your third issue, but I typically use Filename as the sort value. You can select it by looking for a managed property and then using "name" as the filter criteria. You can also use Title - and Joanne's post explains how that filter translates to "SharePoint speak." I can't help you with the image selected for documents. You can control the image for Pages, but I haven't yet seen an image that isn't even in the document - so that's a new one for me!

Thanks Susan! I can live with the prefix for the Managed Metadata attributes but its nice to understand what it means.

 

Regarding the value of the attribute I use for filtering, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any hidden characters (it's just a three letter acronyme in this case) but I'll check it out - it would explain the behaviour.

 

Regarding the displayed title issue, I expected to find a filename as sortvalue but if I search for "name" I get all sorts of varietys suggested, like "EntityName" "owsCultureName" and "owsBaseName" but no "FileName" (not on the next page either).

Capture.JPG

 

The image issue is the most confusing. The picture that is pulled out is definitely made by someone in my org. Could possibly have been included in an earlier version of this document but it is deleted longa ago (even befor the file was uploaded to SharPoint in the first place) I've searched for it meerely to understand what's going on but I cannot find it anywhare in this document. So confusing!

I've seen a similar problem with the image - I was convinced that it wasn't in the document.

However, it was in the document - it had been shrunk down very small behind another image in the document - I only found it by deleting each image in turn to see what was behind each.

Hi and thanks!

That could possibly be the case here. But then it would be nice to understand how SharePoint pics the image to display. In another case it has picked out a competely random picture from a random slide in a powerpoint file. Would be useful to undastand how it works and how to work with this to make it display meaningful or representative pictures.

I believe that it chooses the "highest quality" image from the document.

OK, "highest quality" in terms of number of pixels or what? Could this be changed somehow?
It turned out to be a tiny tiny miniature of the displayed image hidden as part of another image. Why it chooses to pick this particlular image on slide 7 is still a mystery though. MS support engineer didn't have clue either.

Also the title displayed doesn't seem to be possible to have any control over. (i've spend hours with MS support engineers trying to get the correct mapping in place - but NOTHING have desired effect).

The most logical thing would be to display the 'filename' as this property is 100% certain to exist and almost always relevant with regards to the content of the file. The 'title' property is almost never used, its hidden away and very often plain misleading as people tend to make copies of files and just add/change content and save with a new name (but not editing title to reflect the cahanges).

So, I guess we have to live with this webpart being more or less impossible to control and user will have to guess the content of the displayed documents.

@Susan Hanleydo you think you could clarify how you use 'Filename' as the sort value? I'am able to find the managed property Filename, but how do I make the webpart use it?

Here's an image that shows how I'm using the Filename to sort in Highlighted Content. Does this help?Sort-by-filename.jpg

To be honest I don’t know the definition of “highest quality” that is used, I assume it is number of pixels or “file size” of the image. When I removed our offending small image the PPT file size decreased noticeably - hence my assumption that it was the “highest quality”. 

OK now I get it (fell a bit stupid :) I was looking around in the search schema settings where I could find Filename as a managed property but couldn't figure out how to connect that with the Highlighted Content webpart (as apparently use the managed property Title instead).

 

However, sorting on the Filename doesn't seem to affect what is displayed on each "card" in the webpart. Or am I missing something?

 

Nevertheless,  I have managed to gain at least some control over things now. It turned out that for some reason whatever changes I did (during  the call with MS support) - it wasn't saved and I have no idea why it wasn't. Now, however, I can make those changes. If I move the crawled property "Basic10" from the bottom of the list to the top (of the managed property 'title'). Then reindex the site, wait an hour or so, and then... Filenames will be displayed in the webpart.

 

 I still wonder thought if there is any simple way of telling:

1. What managed properties are used by which webpart? (changing "title" seem to affect Highlighted content but what other webparts use the same?)

2. What do the differnet crawled properies actually mean? (It's not easy to guess that "Basic10" repesents filename). - is ther a table of some sort to be found?

 

While writing this it strikes me that changing the managed property "Title" to prioritize Basic10 (i.e. filename) will mean that webparts like the news webpart will display each news item with an ugly name-of-the-news-item-file.aspx. and that's really not what I want. So in the end I'm back where I started with frustration over the limited possibility to control the actual webpart (changing the search scheme is probably not the best cause of action after all).

 

So, I thank you all for your input and insights and appologize for my poorly concealed frustration!

You might very well be correct. In my case this tiny image was perhaps just scaled down but still "high quality".

You're confusing managed properties with managed metadata. 

 

Managed properties are part of search and are created automatically for site columns:

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/technical-reference/crawled-and-managed-properties-overv...

 

The highlighted content webpart is the modern equivalent of the content search webpart. 

 

Your equals clause doesn't work because the managed property you've chosen includes the GUID for the selected term in addition to the text value. If you have created the column as a site column (and allowed time for it to index), you'll have another managed property which contains only the text value. Use that instead.

@Susan HanleyThat is great, however, I would also need to sort by modifcation date... any ideas how I could do that on this webpart? thanks

Have you tried sorting by Most recent? That sort uses the last modified date - and you can sort either ascending or descending. Depending on what you are retrieving, you may also have the option to sort by a Managed Property. If you do, you can use LastModifiedTime as well.
makes sense. Will try that , thanks!